Our Home in Togo

Our Home as a Couple in Togo

by Neal Brinneman

After
I married Carol, we needed a house much bigger than my mud one. One
located just across the street from mine—no more than bare
concrete-block walls and tin roof—had been started over seven years
before. I proposed a rent to the owner that would be the equivalent
money for six bags of cement a month. This would repay what he had
already invested. At the same time, I offered to finish construction of
the house so that whenever our family left Togo, he would have a nice
home. He happily agreed.

The concrete floor needed to be poured,
but first I dug a trench the length of the house for an air tunnel, and
put in electric wiring and plumbing. As with my mud house, I put in a
Masonite ceiling with kapok for insulation. I installed an evaporative
air cooler on one end of the house so that air came in under the floor
and up into each room from the tunnel.

I brought over the
kerosene fridge from the previous house. For a hot water tank, I had to
use a pressure tank from a Caterpillar (from a wreck on the nearby
mountain road) placed above the fridge. The town water pressure was by
then too powerful to safely use a small jerrycan.

For plumbing, I used well liners for septic and shower soak-aways as in the mud house.

A
dispensary, built by the Germans after World War I, had long ago
collapsed and left a six-foot-high dirt mound a few feet from the front
of our house. The dispensary’s three-foot-wide stone foundation and
two-foot wide mud walls had provided insulation against the heat. Each
morning before breakfast, I would spend about an hour digging out the
stones.

The stones served as a foundation for our new garage and
guestroom addition to the house. Later, we built a storeroom and office
on the opposite side of the courtyard where the old dispensary had
been. We then joined the two buildings with a concrete-block wall which
gave us some privacy and kept goats and sheep out. We were finally able
to plant a nice mango tree in the courtyard and enjoyed a couple years
of delicious fruit before we finally left Togo.

When we were on
furlough in Indiana, I was able to repair a malfunctioning garage door
opener my brother had thrown out. We shipped it back to Togo, along
with the track and hinges from another old door. Once in Togo, I built
the panels for an overhead door and assembled them with the hinges,
track and springs. Our young sons “helped” me complete the project over
several months.

We finally got it installed—the only electric
garage door opener in Togo! African children in town would run over to
see how the door would open when the car approached. They also would
put sticks under the door as it came down to see what would happen to
them.

We wanted to grow vegetables in the back yard so I
installed an electric fence to keep out goats, sheep and cows. When the
town children discovered how it gave a mild shock, they would try to
get their friends to touch it on their way home from school. One day
Daniel, our 3-year-old, touched the wire and could not let go. That was
the end of the fence; my wife made me take it out!